Read Online The New Road to Serfdom by Daniel Hannan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Daniel Hannan
Ads: Link
level, tend to have a federaloutlook. Powers delegated to the center in times of war or crisis are rarely devolved when the emergency passes.
Among the twenty-two nations surveyed, the only exception was Canada where, until the mid-1980s, the body equivalent to a supreme court was the British Privy Council, which, not being a Canadian institution, had no interest in strengthening the national authorities at the expense of the provinces. Everywhere else, many more powers were transferred upward than downward.
It is a measure of their genius that the Founding Fathers did their best to take precautions against this tendency, even though they had no direct experience of it. The Bill of Rights that they tacked on to the Constitution, in the form of the first ten Amendments, asserted the prerogatives of the citizen against national institutions, and at the same time protected the sovereignty of the states. The Tenth Amendment (originally proposed by Madison as the ninth) makes explicit what is implicit in the tone of the entire constitutional settlement:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
There were, inevitably, fierce arguments about where to draw the line between state sovereignty and federalauthority: arguments that led, in time, to the Nullification Crisis and eventually to the Civil War. But what strikes the observer at this distance in time is how successful the authors of the Constitution were in securing their objectives. Even today, U.S. states in many ways enjoy more autonomy than whole nations within the European Union: They are able to set their own rates of indirect taxation, for example, and can decide whether or not to apply the death penalty.
That said, the United States has not been immune to the centralizing tendencies that have afflicted other federations. The twentieth century saw a transfer of powers from state to federal authorities, which resulted in a much larger and more unwieldy Washington administration.
__________
The first shift in power happened under Theodore Roosevelt who, pleading the contingency of an active foreign policy, seized for the White House powers that had until then resided with Congress and the states. It was he who began to make widespread use of executive decrees as an instrument of administration. Indeed, the baleful statism of the second Roosevelt would not have been possible without the precedents established by the first.
To be fair, both Roosevelts were men of their time, as was Woodrow Wilson. During the first half of thetwentieth century, most clever and fashionable people believed in the power of the state and the importance of government planning. The U.S. Congress was not immune to global currents of thought, and began to regulate whole industries that had previously operated with minimal oversight: railroads, food production, meat-packing, pharmaceuticals.
The founders had enshrined states’ rights in the Constitution, and amending the Constitution was no simple matter. However, with confidence in federal institutions at its high-water mark, politicians were able to effect considerable transfers of power from state legislatures to Washington, bending the Constitution to their will. Indeed, the neatest way to measure the centralization of this era is by scanning the text of the sudden clutch of amendments.
There had been no amendments for forty-three years following Reconstruction. The Sixteenth Amendment, passed in 1913, was the first of a new set of measures aimed at strengthening the national government. It established the right of Congress to levy income tax, and did so in such broad and general language as would have horrified Jefferson:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
That
Among the twenty-two nations surveyed, the only exception was Canada where, until the mid-1980s, the body equivalent to a supreme court was the British Privy Council, which, not being a Canadian institution, had no interest in strengthening the national authorities at the expense of the provinces. Everywhere else, many more powers were transferred upward than downward.
It is a measure of their genius that the Founding Fathers did their best to take precautions against this tendency, even though they had no direct experience of it. The Bill of Rights that they tacked on to the Constitution, in the form of the first ten Amendments, asserted the prerogatives of the citizen against national institutions, and at the same time protected the sovereignty of the states. The Tenth Amendment (originally proposed by Madison as the ninth) makes explicit what is implicit in the tone of the entire constitutional settlement:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
There were, inevitably, fierce arguments about where to draw the line between state sovereignty and federalauthority: arguments that led, in time, to the Nullification Crisis and eventually to the Civil War. But what strikes the observer at this distance in time is how successful the authors of the Constitution were in securing their objectives. Even today, U.S. states in many ways enjoy more autonomy than whole nations within the European Union: They are able to set their own rates of indirect taxation, for example, and can decide whether or not to apply the death penalty.
That said, the United States has not been immune to the centralizing tendencies that have afflicted other federations. The twentieth century saw a transfer of powers from state to federal authorities, which resulted in a much larger and more unwieldy Washington administration.
__________
The first shift in power happened under Theodore Roosevelt who, pleading the contingency of an active foreign policy, seized for the White House powers that had until then resided with Congress and the states. It was he who began to make widespread use of executive decrees as an instrument of administration. Indeed, the baleful statism of the second Roosevelt would not have been possible without the precedents established by the first.
To be fair, both Roosevelts were men of their time, as was Woodrow Wilson. During the first half of thetwentieth century, most clever and fashionable people believed in the power of the state and the importance of government planning. The U.S. Congress was not immune to global currents of thought, and began to regulate whole industries that had previously operated with minimal oversight: railroads, food production, meat-packing, pharmaceuticals.
The founders had enshrined states’ rights in the Constitution, and amending the Constitution was no simple matter. However, with confidence in federal institutions at its high-water mark, politicians were able to effect considerable transfers of power from state legislatures to Washington, bending the Constitution to their will. Indeed, the neatest way to measure the centralization of this era is by scanning the text of the sudden clutch of amendments.
There had been no amendments for forty-three years following Reconstruction. The Sixteenth Amendment, passed in 1913, was the first of a new set of measures aimed at strengthening the national government. It established the right of Congress to levy income tax, and did so in such broad and general language as would have horrified Jefferson:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
That
Similar Books
